


A swan escaped its cage

by middlemarch



Category: Ballerina | Leap! (2016)
Genre: Ballet, F/M, Foot Massage, Hurt/Comfort, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-28
Updated: 2017-08-28
Packaged: 2018-12-20 19:15:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11927454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: It had not become a ritual. Yet.





	A swan escaped its cage

Odette had not danced in years but she still had the feet of a ballerina. He held them in his hands and felt the arches that curved beneath her soles, the way the bones were aligned, the calluses and the heels that each fit in his palms like an early plum. Once, these feet had bled every day and she had learned not to grimace, even when she changed the bandages that kept her from tracing her life across the stage like a poet’s ink. He stroked his hands across them, up past her slender ankles, that could inflame a man who had not spent his life among dancers, and his right hand learned the way her leg was crippled; the bone had broken twice or more and it had not healed right. If she did not use her stick, she would have to drag it on the cobbled streets, on the marble stairs she scrubbed. Her hip must ache with it and her shoulders, where she kept all the strain of walking. He wanted to make her sigh—with relief if he could not divine how to bring her unadulterated pleasure yet, he wanted her to close her eyes and turn her face into her pillow while he hummed under his breath. She kept looking at him, her blue eyes too aware, the breath caught in her throat, her hands pressed down flat in the folds of her shift and he knew he must not yield to his impulse and kiss her, not where she had once defied nature and gone en pointe.

“Am I hurting you?” he asked, not letting go of her but not holding so tightly. He was not her physician, to be excused, nor her masseur, to be endured. He was not her teacher, to be obeyed. He was her friend again and her lover, and if lately she had taken his name, that was the least of it, none of the roles ones he would allow her to suffer his touch.

“Not you,” she said. He had though, the years he had not helped her—those long years he had let her work beneath his notice, as if she were a ghost and he was someone who could not be haunted. Not now, she meant, not his hands on her body or his eyes watching her, not the way he failed to call her chérie when he addressed her.

“I hurt, it hurts,” she explained. She did not raise herself up on her elbows or reach a hand down to draw his face closer to hers. She did not look at the ceiling when she spoke and her hair was loose black silk upon his pillow.

“When you touch me, I feel it more—and then less, when you touch me, it is not so hard. I can feel something else,” she said. She understood herself as she told him, he heard that in her tone, saw it in the way her eyes stopped looking like a November storm. He remembered the first time he had seen her grande jeté and how silently she had come down, the foot he held in his hand quieter than a moth landing on a blossom.

“You must tell me,” he said. It was a request and not a demand, he was begging and she smiled to hear it.

“Perhaps I will, Louis.”

**Author's Note:**

> A little more romantic Odette/Louis, this time with a foot massage and all its attendant baggage. The title is from "La Cygne" by Baudelaire.


End file.
